THE EXECUTIVE COMPUTER

THE EXECUTIVE COMPUTER; Borland Seeks Best of Both Worlds

By Peter H. Lewis

Published: October 15, 1989

Bucking a trend, the Borland International Corporation says it can write a spreadsheet program that has more features than Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 or Microsoft Excel and can also run nicely on a low-end office personal computer. Borland's program, Quattro Pro, was announced this month, although it will not be ready for sale until the end of the year.

It is unfair to compare Lotus 1-2-3 or Excel, programs that exist, with Quattro Pro, which floats in the netherworld of vaporware, an industry term for products that are announced before they exist. Vaporware wins every comparison, since it has every feature the user wants, no bugs and comes without charge (because one cannot buy it). When vaporware makes the transition to a tangible product it almost always sheds features, does not work quite the way the company had promised and sprouts a price tag.

Borland has had a policy of announcing no product until it is ready to ship it. But because corporate software buyers are now evaluating whether to buy the newly updated versions of Lotus 1-2-3 or to switch, Borland decided to promote Quattro Pro as a contender capable of displacing 1-2-3.

Borland's current spreadsheet, known simply as Quattro, is already a superior Lotus-compatible spreadsheet. In a recent PC Week poll it ranked highest in satisfaction among corporate spreadsheet users. Earlier this month Borland lowered the list price of Quattro to $129.95 from $247.50, to clear the shelves for Quattro Pro, which will have a suggested list price of $495.

Quattro Pro is scheduled for shipping ''in the fourth quarter,'' the company says, and Borland officials have been demonstrating and testing versions of it for some time. Judging from these versions, Quattro Pro can handle much larger files than its predecessor; it can link data from multiple worksheets, a feature just added to the high-end version of 1-2-3, and it has a wealth of fancy graphics tools for people who like to jazz up their reports with boxes, shadings, charts and different type fonts.

''There are still applications where a version of 1-2-3 might be recommended, or where Excel might truly excel,'' the industry newsletter Byteweek concluded recently. ''But in a very large number of cases, Quattro Pro will probably be the hands-down winner.'' The program's most impressive aspect, however, is that it does all this on an I.B.M. XT or compatible computer equipped with a minimum of 512 kilobytes of random access memory (512K RAM) and a hard disk. By current corporate standards, an XT with 512K and a hard disk is a cheap, low-end machine.

Some big names in software publishing, including the Lotus Development Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., and the Ashton-Tate Corporation of Torrance, Calif., the maker of dBASE, recently split their product lines into high-end and low-end versions to reflect the fact that all business computers are not created equal. The split also reflected their determination that it was not possible to cram the advanced features that users want into the 640K RAM that most users have.

Lotus has delivered two new versions of 1-2-3. The most powerful version, 3.0, requires a machine driven by an 80386 processor, or a very fast 80286-based machine with at least 1 megabyte of RAM. That eliminates most PC's in use today.

For the majority of spreadsheet users, Lotus delivered Version 2.2, which added a few features from its previous release. It is not in the same league as 3.0, but to get those features, the user had to buy new hardware.

Lotus's two-tier strategy probably reflects the reality of today's office, and it is a fix for companies that need more power but cannot justify putting a $10,000 PC on everyone's desk. But it also creates something of a headache for the people responsible for orchestrating an office's computer operations. It creates different classes of users, which can complicate training and support. Files created under version 3.0 may not work with version 2.2, and older-version macros - small programs that can customize certain tasks for each user - may not work with version 3. To further complicate things, Lotus has a still higher-end version of 1-2-3 in the works for the next-generation OS/2 operating system. OS/2 needs many megabytes of memory and a powerful, speedy chip, preferably an 80386.

As always, the additional expense of high-end hardware and software is certainly justified if the change results in higher productivity. Still, not everyone needs such power. Just as people who do not need and never use the services of expensive ''platinum'' or ''gold'' credit cards covet them nonetheless, people who do not need three-dimensional modeling capabilities will want 1-2-3 version 3.0 anyway. Indeed many users of Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.01 may not have any need to upgrade; they may be content with the old version for years to come.

For those who want more power, though, Quattro Pro appears prepared to give them the features of Lotus 3.0 without requiring big outlays for hardware. Thus it can prolong the useful life of the workhorse XT's and AT's that are the backbone of most corporate fleets of personal computers.

Although it is too soon to tell whether Quattro Pro will be fully compatible with existing Lotus 1-2-3 files, Borland asserts that it will recognize every macro program, keystroke and commands of version 2.01. If so, the ''pain level'' of switching an entire office to a new spreadsheet would be relatively small.

How did Borland's technical wizards manage to squeeze five gallons of features into a one-gallon bucket? The technique they developed is called Virtual Real-time Object-Oriented Memory Management, or VROOMM.

Most DOS programs are composed of relatively large chunks of computer code that are swapped in and out of memory as the program is used. These so-called fixed overlay files typically eat up hundreds of kilobytes of memory space, which in turn limits the size of the spreadsheet, word processing or data base files being created.

VROOMM breaks the application into bite-size (well, 2 kilobyte to 4 kilobyte) granules, which can be shifted into and out of memory much more efficiently. The system uses only as much of the computer code as is needed to do the immediate job, leaving more room for the user's data.